AWAKENING FROM A CULTURAL TRANCE: AN ECOPSYCHOLOGICAL CASE STUDY Molly Young Brown

Molly Young Brown grew up in Los Alamos, a town that was forced to live a lie. This is the story of how ecopsychology helped her find the truth about her community. Molly Young Brown is associate faculty at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California and has a private consulting practice in Petaluma, California, focusing on ecopsychology, psychosynthesis, and spiritual direction. She is author of The Unfolding Self: Psychosynthesis and Counseling (Psychosynthesis Press, 1983), Growing Whole: Self-Realization on an Endangered Planet (Hazelden, 1993), and Lighting a Candle: Quotations on the Spiritual Life (Hazelden, 1994). With Joanna Macy, she is co-authoring Entering the Heart of the World: A Deep Ecology Handbook (New Society, forthcoming, 1998). E-mail: MollyECO@ap.net

THIS IS A story of awakening -- to the cultural trance of a home town, and to the psychological and spiritual effects on someone growing up in that culture. It is an ecopsychology story because of its implications for an individual's interrelationships within the larger human world and the more-than-human world, and because the awakening took place on a vision quest in the wild.          I was raised in Los Alamos, the "Atomic City," the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Los Alamos is nestled in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, so my childhood playground was nature. From an early age, I camped, picnicked, and played in the woods and canyons that interlace the town, establishing a strong relationship with trees, mountains, creeks, and critters. I believe it was this relationship that sustained me and eventually helped me to awaken from the cultural trance of my home town. Growing up in Los Alamos, I learned to worship the God of Science (along with a rather pale Protestant God). I remember going to "Family Days Open House" at the lab, as we called it -- a rare opportunity to go behind the security fences and see a little of what they did there. I was enchanted by the apparatus, the cloud chambers, the accelerators, the glove boxes, and the tissues studied under microscope. I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. I wanted that access to the mysterious inner workings of the world.         I also learned that there was a correct way of thinking: "logical," "rational," backed by scientific data and framed within measurable parameters. If it couldn't be measured and replicated in the lab, it probably didn't exist. Even then, one would have to defend one's understandings and hypotheses against the rigorous (and often hostile) critique of other scientists. I heard tales of meetings in which senior scientists would attack and ridicule any new theory, judging it primarily by its author's ability to withstand the attack.

I also learned that feelings and fantasy had little place in scientific thinking, and that I had best keep those kinds of things out of the discussion. Feelings and dreams were fine for girls' slumber party chatter, but had no place in the Real World.         On a solo vision quest at the beginning of 1996, I saw more clearly than ever before how this "mere purposive rationality" (to use Gregory Bateson's term) distorted people's innate morality at Los Alamos, and led them to do grievous harm to the world. I was finally able to break through my own denial about my community of origin and see how profoundly this distortion affected me as I grew up there.         The vision quest took place in a verdant desert canyon in Baja California, Mexico. We questers spent three days and nights alone in widely dispersed campsites, fasting, meditating, chanting, praying, and whatever else occurred to us to do. I felt sick to my stomach most of the time, perhaps brought on by fasting. During the last night's vigil, this became intense, and I remembered how often I had stomach aches as a child, how I spent lots of time in the school nurse's office, especially in kindergarten and first grade. I focused on the sensations of discomfort and pain I was experiencing because they seemed very similar to what I had felt as a child. I found myself asking, "What is the secret? What is this deeply hidden trauma that I have defended myself from all my life?"         And suddenly I knew.

My family moved to Los Alamos a few months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I believe now that I knew, as a small child can, that something terribly wrong was going on. No doubt I heard radio news and conversations about bombs and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I must have known or sensed that people in Los Alamos had something to do with what happened there. I knew that the town existed solely for the lab to carry on "atomic" research, primarily focused on nuclear weapons. Instinctively I must have felt this work was wrong. Even "Atoms for Peace," highly touted in Los Alamos in the fifties, was an elaborate (and understandable) self-justification for the main work of the laboratory: building weapons of mass destruction. Los Alamos scientists participated in atmospheric testing in Nevada, which spread radioactivity across the West, poisoning thousands of people. Even the so-called peaceful uses yielded toxic, radioactive wastes that had no safe place to go. I lived under a cloud of fear, dreading radioactive contamination from accidents or poorly handled wastes, a fear later compounded by living in a community directly targeted by Soviet missiles.         Recently we learned that radioactive particles were deliberately released over Los Alamos, to study fallout patterns. I am convinced that as a child I "knew" all this at a deep, largely unconscious, level.         Yet from everyone around me, all the important people in my life, from the entire community, I heard only rationalizations and justifications. These scientists, technicians, and managers were the loving, kind parents of my friends. We were special people doing important and special work, protected from the rest of the world by security fences and gates. Even while I felt proud of the title "Atomic City," I felt pain and confusion in my heart about its implications. Although I may never have consciously thought about this deep contradiction, I carried it in my body, primarily in my digestive system. I could not "stomach it." But neither could I, as a dependent child, speak of it. How could I even let myself know that nice, good people that I loved and admired were engaged in destructive work, when they themselves could not possibly acknowledge it? How could I challenge the myth of my whole community?         I can play tapes of "rational" justification in my head, and they still have the power to confuse me. We had to invent the bomb before the Nazis did and then, after Germany was defeated, we had to defeat the Japanese. We have all heard the justifications for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet we know the deep anguish most of us feel for the massive suffering engendered by that "justified" act.

I recall a conversation I had nearly twenty years ago with a friend who is a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos. He was complaining about people in the Nuclear Freeze movement being "so emotional." I said rather vehemently that I could not imagine not being emotional about something which threatened the lives of my children and everything I loved. In Los Alamos, however, such emotions became taboo. Emotions might call into question the behavior so elaborately rationalized by thought.         Los Alamos is not alone in this practice of covering up and denying its wrong-doing, and inventing elaborate "rational" justifications for it. Our whole economic structure today participates in this kind of self-deception, as we ignore and cover-up the enormous harm we routinely do to the our own life support system, to other living beings with whom we share the biosphere, and to oppressed peoples around the world and within our own country. Living in a society that does this has engendered a deep conflict within me, and presumably many others, but the taboos against speaking of it, or even seeing it, are subtle, strong, and complex. Being nice -- even being "intelligent" -- means going along with the communal deception, like the mutually shared trance of an alcoholic family. Yet we do ourselves and the larger world real damage when we go along with the taboos and deny the truth of our inner- knowing.         I needed to spend time alone in the wilderness to come to this realization. I needed to remove myself from the constant conditioning of media, advertising, and cultural behavior patterns in order to uncover this contradiction buried so deeply in my soul and body. Fasting helped weaken the psycho-physiological armor I had built up over the years to seal off the anguish         From this awakening, I carry a fierce commitment to myself and to life, a commitment to discern and question our cultural self-deceptions. I am slowly learning -- first, how to recognize them, and second, how to speak of them to others with clarity and compassion. This may be the hardest and most fundamental endeavor of my life, and clearly I cannot do it as an individual. It is something we all must undertake together. Spending time in the wild can help enormously, allowing us to see the insanities of our "normal" way of living, while reconnecting with the fundamental rhythms and flows of life. People working in the fields of ecopsychology and deep ecology are examining our cultural beliefs and world views, to see where and how we have separated ourselves so dangerously from the rest of nature and convinced ourselves to exploit, rape, and pillage our planet and its peoples. Dialogue groups based on David Bohm's work are attempting to question our collective assumptions, to discover which ones are getting us into trouble. Social and political philosophers are challenging us to examine our economic premises, especially the powerful and often destructive role that the multinational corporate system has come to play in our lives. We need all of these approaches and more to awaken from our cultural/economic trance and rediscover how to live harmoniously and sustainably within the web of life.

Back to the Eco-Psy Politics page

© 1997 The Ecopsychology Institute